Intelligence co-operation or liaison, as it is called, is not a game for the novice or the uninitiated. Only a select few in an intelligence organisation are normally allowed to handle the arrangements and that too after having worked in the system for years. Intelligence co-operation goes beyond mere exchange of information. It can include help to upgrade abilities and facilities in each other’s countries. It is a vital and safe channel of communication even at times of near ruptured or in the absence of diplomatic relations. In today’s world, intelligence liaison has become fair game for all. Spying on friends is not taboo in this game and the best time to make inroads is when relations are warm and comfortable.
Heads of Government have quite often used their intelligence chiefs to convey sensitive messages to their counterparts or maintain contact with each other, especially where in the absence of formal relations there was need for political deniability. Effective intelligence is also a by-product of a sound relationship and trust between the intelligence chief and the chief executive of a country.
Intelligence co-operation need not only be a bilateral arrangement. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the English-speaking victors of the war – the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Canada got together to exchange information about the common threat which was the Soviet Union at that time. Communications intelligence was exchanged by these countries and at times about uncomfortable political opponents who could not be covered by agencies because of domestic laws that prohibited such espionage. In the 1980s the exchange evolved into Project Echelon, which graduated from exchanging processed intelligence to ‘raw’ intercepts. Echelon monitors about 120 satellites all over the world, includes nonmilitary communications of governments, business houses, private establishments and individuals.
When stories about the Echelon leaked that one section of the allies were snooping on the other, Europeans like the French and Germans were livid. There was uproar in the European Parliament and the US and British were accused of ‘state-sponsored information piracy’. There were accusations/suspicions that the US used this system to advise its negotiators in the trade talks with the Japanese, on another occasion to help Boeing beat Airbus in the deal with Saudi Arabia and clinch the Enron deal with India beating the British bid this time.
The volume of traffic intercepts is indeed huge; the volume of international telephone traffic, including from cell-phones, is now estimated to be approximately 200 billion seconds a year. Any communication sent into space is susceptible to monitoring thus needs equally massive downstream activity to process this. Reliance on key words and voice recognition has its problems; the former can cause communications traffic jams and the latter is not completely reliable. In addition there is coverage through reconnaissance satellites which are like vacuum cleaners sweeping in everything and take high resolution photographs, keep the entire globe under watch, can detect nuclear blasts, warn of missile launches and can record the telemetry of missile flights. Bases strewn all over the world help download this data. It could be a comforting thought that one lives in such a stratospheric cocoon or highly disconcerting that we live in Orwell’s world.
The CIA and the KGB maintained contacts with each other even when the Cold War temperatures were near freezing. At about the same time, the US had two listening posts in Qitai and Korla in the Xinjiang province to listen into Soviet Russia in the 1980’s. The Germans also had an intelligence relationship with the Chinese service at least as far back as in the 1980s. The French intelligence chief, Alexandre de Meranches, founder of the secretive Safari Club that included other friendly and trusted intelligence agencies, had foreseen Soviet intrusion into Afghanistan and had advised the newly elected Reagan to prepare for a counter offensive in Afghanistan.
Apart from the obvious influence mechanisms, the Western power elite functions in many secretive ways. Many years ago, Robert Ludlum in one of his earlier novels had four powerful international individuals as the secret controllers of the world. It did not seem real then as Ludlum’s multi-talented covert cold warriors fought ruthless wars against enemies of the free world. But Ludlum obviously based some of his novels on the realities of the day and his fantasies were more real than those of General Musharraf.
There are other influential secret societies in the West like the Bilderberg Group formed in 1954 by a small group of rich and powerful trans-Atlantic individuals to help keep Europe allied to the US and communism at bay. This group (named after the hotel in Arnhem in the Netherlands where they first met) remains an exclusive and secretive group that includes politicians, financiers, the media moghuls and the corporate world. The group allows no reporters, there is only an answering machine and no minutes are issued which-leads to various interpretations about its role. For instance, the Serbs blamed Bilderberg for the war that led to the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic.
Another secret society, that has a number of former intelligence officers as its members, Pinay Circle (earlier known as the Cercle Violet), described as a secret right-wing transnational intelligence and direct action group used to fight communism. The Circle is said to be more in the business of regime change in the West to keep the US and Europe close to each other and right-wing. The group continues to exist although communism is no longer the threat it was. Its members have been persons like Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, (all three associated with the Bilderberg Group), George Soros, Paul Volcker, Turki Al-Faisal, the former CIA Chief, Willam Colby, and numerous other US, British and German intelligence officers like Frank Wisner jr. Nadhmi Auchi, a one-time Saddam Hussein confidante was also a member of this secret group. British luminaries have included Lord Julian Amery and James Goldsmith. The Circle is also linked to other influential groups like the Heritage Foundation and Opus Dei, often through its members. There were allegations that in the Seventies the group helped in the downfall of British Premiers Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, French President Francois Mitterand and the beneficiaries included Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Additionally, like any other system, intelligence functions best in a certain milieu. Many of the major powers of the world have treated their intelligence services as an important sword-arm for providing internal security and for securing foreign policy objectives or denying adversaries and even friends their objectives. When the Mossad was hunting for the Black September terrorists in the 1970s, one of the agents had to masquerade himself as a woman. This agent was Ehud Barak, who later became the Israeli Prime Minister. Many others who headed their countries’ intelligence services switched to overt governance with ease and distinction. Bush Sr in the US was one; Andropov, Primakov and Putin in Russia, Kang Sheng and Chiao Shi in China became members of the Politburo, Klaus Kinkel became Germany’s Foreign Minister, Hosni Mubarak looked after the Egyptian Intelligence during Sadat’s Presidency.
In a world of globalised terror, globalised economics and competition, the traditional threats to the developed world have changed. Democracy and its preservation remains serious business extending beyond the tinsel and glamour of the screen and the rhetoric at election rallies. The system of global surveillance with and against friends will remain with all levers of control lying with the rich and powerful.
Heads of Government have quite often used their intelligence chiefs to convey sensitive messages to their counterparts or maintain contact with each other, especially where in the absence of formal relations there was need for political deniability. Effective intelligence is also a by-product of a sound relationship and trust between the intelligence chief and the chief executive of a country.
Intelligence co-operation need not only be a bilateral arrangement. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the English-speaking victors of the war – the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and Canada got together to exchange information about the common threat which was the Soviet Union at that time. Communications intelligence was exchanged by these countries and at times about uncomfortable political opponents who could not be covered by agencies because of domestic laws that prohibited such espionage. In the 1980s the exchange evolved into Project Echelon, which graduated from exchanging processed intelligence to ‘raw’ intercepts. Echelon monitors about 120 satellites all over the world, includes nonmilitary communications of governments, business houses, private establishments and individuals.
When stories about the Echelon leaked that one section of the allies were snooping on the other, Europeans like the French and Germans were livid. There was uproar in the European Parliament and the US and British were accused of ‘state-sponsored information piracy’. There were accusations/suspicions that the US used this system to advise its negotiators in the trade talks with the Japanese, on another occasion to help Boeing beat Airbus in the deal with Saudi Arabia and clinch the Enron deal with India beating the British bid this time.
The volume of traffic intercepts is indeed huge; the volume of international telephone traffic, including from cell-phones, is now estimated to be approximately 200 billion seconds a year. Any communication sent into space is susceptible to monitoring thus needs equally massive downstream activity to process this. Reliance on key words and voice recognition has its problems; the former can cause communications traffic jams and the latter is not completely reliable. In addition there is coverage through reconnaissance satellites which are like vacuum cleaners sweeping in everything and take high resolution photographs, keep the entire globe under watch, can detect nuclear blasts, warn of missile launches and can record the telemetry of missile flights. Bases strewn all over the world help download this data. It could be a comforting thought that one lives in such a stratospheric cocoon or highly disconcerting that we live in Orwell’s world.
The CIA and the KGB maintained contacts with each other even when the Cold War temperatures were near freezing. At about the same time, the US had two listening posts in Qitai and Korla in the Xinjiang province to listen into Soviet Russia in the 1980’s. The Germans also had an intelligence relationship with the Chinese service at least as far back as in the 1980s. The French intelligence chief, Alexandre de Meranches, founder of the secretive Safari Club that included other friendly and trusted intelligence agencies, had foreseen Soviet intrusion into Afghanistan and had advised the newly elected Reagan to prepare for a counter offensive in Afghanistan.
Apart from the obvious influence mechanisms, the Western power elite functions in many secretive ways. Many years ago, Robert Ludlum in one of his earlier novels had four powerful international individuals as the secret controllers of the world. It did not seem real then as Ludlum’s multi-talented covert cold warriors fought ruthless wars against enemies of the free world. But Ludlum obviously based some of his novels on the realities of the day and his fantasies were more real than those of General Musharraf.
There are other influential secret societies in the West like the Bilderberg Group formed in 1954 by a small group of rich and powerful trans-Atlantic individuals to help keep Europe allied to the US and communism at bay. This group (named after the hotel in Arnhem in the Netherlands where they first met) remains an exclusive and secretive group that includes politicians, financiers, the media moghuls and the corporate world. The group allows no reporters, there is only an answering machine and no minutes are issued which-leads to various interpretations about its role. For instance, the Serbs blamed Bilderberg for the war that led to the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic.
Another secret society, that has a number of former intelligence officers as its members, Pinay Circle (earlier known as the Cercle Violet), described as a secret right-wing transnational intelligence and direct action group used to fight communism. The Circle is said to be more in the business of regime change in the West to keep the US and Europe close to each other and right-wing. The group continues to exist although communism is no longer the threat it was. Its members have been persons like Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, (all three associated with the Bilderberg Group), George Soros, Paul Volcker, Turki Al-Faisal, the former CIA Chief, Willam Colby, and numerous other US, British and German intelligence officers like Frank Wisner jr. Nadhmi Auchi, a one-time Saddam Hussein confidante was also a member of this secret group. British luminaries have included Lord Julian Amery and James Goldsmith. The Circle is also linked to other influential groups like the Heritage Foundation and Opus Dei, often through its members. There were allegations that in the Seventies the group helped in the downfall of British Premiers Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, French President Francois Mitterand and the beneficiaries included Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Additionally, like any other system, intelligence functions best in a certain milieu. Many of the major powers of the world have treated their intelligence services as an important sword-arm for providing internal security and for securing foreign policy objectives or denying adversaries and even friends their objectives. When the Mossad was hunting for the Black September terrorists in the 1970s, one of the agents had to masquerade himself as a woman. This agent was Ehud Barak, who later became the Israeli Prime Minister. Many others who headed their countries’ intelligence services switched to overt governance with ease and distinction. Bush Sr in the US was one; Andropov, Primakov and Putin in Russia, Kang Sheng and Chiao Shi in China became members of the Politburo, Klaus Kinkel became Germany’s Foreign Minister, Hosni Mubarak looked after the Egyptian Intelligence during Sadat’s Presidency.
In a world of globalised terror, globalised economics and competition, the traditional threats to the developed world have changed. Democracy and its preservation remains serious business extending beyond the tinsel and glamour of the screen and the rhetoric at election rallies. The system of global surveillance with and against friends will remain with all levers of control lying with the rich and powerful.
Source : Hindustan Times 21st oct 2006
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